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Predicting the Future of YouTube

Doomsayers have had their field day! Viacom has filed a 1bn$ lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company Google for copyright infringement and also wants YouTube to be prohibited from hosting anyother video of theirs.

Blogdom is buzzing with experts analyzing this news and almost everybody is anticipating more lawsuits coming Google's way. Larry Dignan calls it nearing of 'YouTube's end game' and Donna Bogatin goes to extent of calling Google as 'Internet Bubble 2.0'

I feel Donna might have gone too far with that statement but the fact remains that atleast one of the fears of Larry Page and Sergey Brin about making Google a public company has indeed proved to be true. Google has become a behemoth and that makes it much more enviable and much more susceptible to scrutiny and scathing rival attacks. People are suing Google left, right and centre over any issue they can find. So if AFP and Belgian Newspapers have to sue Google News for showing their news (which they can very easily avoid, if they want), publishers across the world sue Google Book Search and now Viacom has opened Pandora's box for YouTube.

What is the future for YouTube? Dignan thinks YouTube will loose its sheen if all professional content is removed. That is undoubtedly true. But there are two possibilities:

1) Shift in the origin of professional content: If western media companies don't share their content, maybe Asian companies will want to fill the void and make good of the opportunity. This is not that farfetched as it may seem. Internet is spreading fast in India and this media is ripe for marketing.

2) More advertising/marketing oriented content: If Adidas and Nike ad videos are being added to favorites or someone is posting the new promo of a Karan Johar movie to her blog, I don't see anyone complaining. I sincerely believe that we have a nice ad avenue here waiting to be tapped, specially for Indian companies.

However the simplest way out could be Google throwing its weight around and getting some media tieups! This is actually possible and we should see this happening pretty soon.

I may not be the greatest Google fan ever but then who would want the 'Invention of the Year 2006' go bust so soon!

I had a form in which user can upload a file and another field 'name' in which she can give any name to the file being loaded.

When I submitted the form, the file was uploaded fine but the value in name field was garbled. I followed all the possible suggestions I found:

<%@page pageEncoding="UTF-8"%> set. <%@page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8"%gt; set after the first directive. <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"> in the head. enctype="multipart/form-data" attribute in the form. accept-charset="UTF-8" attribute in the form. in the Servlet: before doing any operations on request object: request.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8"); For accessing the value

I was getting this exception during build while running ant. Googling didn't help much and I was flummoxed because the same code was running fine till now.

My code reads a text file and does some operations on the basis of values read. It was only when I saw the text files I understood the error. I had copied the text in wordpad and saved it as .txt file. Wordpad had put lot of formatting information before and after the content. Also there was "\par" after every line, which was giving this error.

So moral of the story: if you get this exception check your properties file (or any other file that your code might be reading.)